Review

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Book Reviews 2025

Book Reviews

What’s good, what’s bad, and what’s in between in literature this year? Here we review the latest titles.

Latest

Looking for a new book? Here are 10 new titles to try

Our reviewers cast their eyes over new fiction and non-fiction releases.

  • Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
Nicolas Rothwell won the PM’s prize for fiction.

Drifters, vagrants and loners: a lyrical journey through Australia’s interior

The world through which an unnamed narrator journeys, accompanied by various companions, is one you can hear and smell.

  • Declan Fry
Montana Mountain King

This yarn about the links between wool and war might surprise you

Australia’s large-scale sheep pastoralism and the northern hemisphere’s industrialisation of woollen textiles allowed the huge armies of the 20th century to exist, a new history argues.

  • Ken Haley
A thylacine.

These personal portraits of extinct species may well make you cry

Feelings of grief are unavoidable when reading about the species that have disappeared due to human encroachment.

  • Simon Caterson

Searching for something to read? Here are 10 new books

Our reviewers cast their eyes over new fiction and non-fiction releases

  • Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
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Muriel Spark in 1974.

This biography does fullest justice to the maddest stories imaginable

Frances Wilson explores of the early life and work of the late Scottish novelist and poet Muriel Spark.

  • Peter Craven
The Princess of Wales pictured on May 27, 1997.

Princess Diana’s enduring legacy, from conspiracy theories to drag culture

A new “cultural autopsy” examines the late royal as a global cultural obsession.

  • Nathan Smith
Karl Wiebke, “Circular Building 4”.

What drives the human instinct to create art?

Critic Quentin Sprague attempts to answer questions about art, obsession and creativity through spending time with Australian artists.

  • Gabriella Coslovich
Murray Middleton.

A darkly funny look at artists – their egos, failures and bad behaviour

Murray Middleton’s short stories deals with filmmakers, musicians, actors, playwrights, photographers and writers in varying states of creative frustration.

  • Jack Cameron Stanton